Has The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder Gone Mad?

In a new article, Marc Ambinder, politics editor of The Atlantic, asks: Have Conservatives Gone Mad? He says yes.

Serious thinkers on the right have finally gotten around to a full and open debate on the epistemic closure problem that’s plaguing the conservative movement. The issue, to put it in terms that even I can understand, because I didn’t study philosophy much in college: has the conservative base gone mad?

Here are his main points:

• Conservative journalists, including TV personalities (obviously referring to FOX), but excluding those few “serious thinkers” among conservatives, have become “untethered” from the “real world.” Correspondingly, the Republican base – he doesn’t define it – “seems to have developed a notion that bromides are equivalent to policy-thinking, and that therapy is a substitute for thinking.”
• The “most trenchant and effective criticism of President Obama today comes” from the left. He cites MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann among several examples.
• Meanwhile, the media – meaning the only true, authentic and professional journalists like those who work for ABC where Marc once worked, and at CBS where he is now chief political consultant – are reasserting themselves as “gatekeepers.” That begs the questions: When and why did its assertion cease? And is one journalist, Jake Tapper, sufficient proof of a collective “reassertion?”

To summarize Marc: Most conservatives have gone bonkers; pundits on the Left are the most acute Obama critics; and the legacy media are today’s gatekeepers. Gatekeepers of… well, Ambinder doesn’t say who or what they’re keeping in, and out. Maybe an enlightened perspective on current events equivalent to Marc’s, but that’s just a guess.

I want to find Republicans to take seriously, but it is hard. Not because they don’t exist — serious Republicans — but because, as Sanchez and others seem to recognize, they are marginalized, even self-marginalizing, and the base itself seems to have developed a notion that bromides are equivalent to policy-thinking, and that therapy is a substitute for thinking.

Perhaps you’ve seen that sketch that yields to two interpretations. Look at it one way and it’s the full face of a beautiful young woman. Glance away and come back to it and you might see the profile of an ugly old woman. When used for pedagogical purposes it makes the point that one’s point-of-view expresses one’s perspective. It’s all about how we see things. How we read and interpret people and events. Variance in perspectives results in debate. When serious variants can’t be peacefully resolved among nations, wars happen.

In the debate underway between Left and Right over how we’re to proceed as a nation, Marc is dedicated to the Left point-of-view. Fine.

Amidst mounting opposition to his perspective coming from conservatives, Marc is afloat in the weakening current of a mainstream journalism struggling to “reassert” dominance, and drowning. That frustration is expressed in his ad hominem arguments. Marc, that’s some free reality therapy to think about.

Those who disagree with Marc’s point-of-view are “untethered” from the “real world” – in other words, they don’t share his perspective, which makes them…mad. Not angry mad, but crazy mad.

Those who share Marc’s perspective, Maddow et al, are the genuine, real world critics of the Obama administration. It’s a claim so strange on its face, and so unnecessary to his attack on conservatives, that it begs the question: If Maddow et al are the most effective critics of Obama, then why bother to pick on conservative critics, since they’re not nearly as effective? What’s that about?